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No Ben Roethlisberger, No Problem: The Steelers Always Find a Way to Survive.
- Updated: October 18, 2016
Stop me if you have heard this one before: The Steelers look like Super Bowl contenders, but Ben Roethlisberger is injured, forcing the team to cross its fingers and try to survive behind a backup quarterback for a while.
Sounds like last year. And 2012. And 2010. And 2005.
Roethlisberger rarely plays a full 16-game season. Sometimes he misses just one start due to injury, like in 2011 or 2009. But he often misses a multigame chunk of the season. Roethlisberger underwent surgery for a torn meniscus on Monday. With the bye coming after a visit from the Patriots, it is not clear whether Roethlisberger will miss just one game or a “chunk.”
Either way, the Steelers are going to be fine. They’ve been here and done this many times. In fact, history tells us exactly what to expect during Roethlisberger’s absence:
The backups will be bad. There will probably be more than one of them. The Steelers will somehow grind out a win or two. Roethlisberger will be back sooner than expected. The Steelers will still make a playoff run. Or even a Super Bowl run.
Let’s run through each of those bullet points to understand just why no one in Pittsburgh is panicking.
The backups will be bad. Landry Jones is 32-of-56 (57.1 percent) for 513 yards, three touchdowns and four interceptions in a four-year career that includes two starts, some cleanup appearances and one pass attempt on Sunday before the Steelers decided they were better off with an injured Roethlisberger in the game than Jones.
The high point of Jones’ NFL career was a two-touchdown relief effort against the Cardinals last season, punctuated by an 88-yard pass to Martavis Bryant late in the game. The low point of Jones’ NFL career may have been when he was pulled from the lineup in favor of a still-hobbled Roethlisberger on Sunday.
Jones threw four interceptions in a preseason loss to the Eagles in August. When I visited the Steelers in training camp, there was real chatter about fourth-stringer Dustin Vaughan supplanting either Bruce Gradkowski (Roethlisberger’s hypothetical, perpetually injured veteran backup) or Jones. In four preseasons and training camps, Jones has never even been good enough to render Gradkowski extraneous, which is not exactly an endorsement. (Jones, however, won the long game, as both Gradkowski and Vaughan have since been released.)
But Jones is just the latest in a long line of stopgap Steelers backups.
There will probably be more than one of them. The Steelers signed Michael Vick as Roethlisberger insurance when Gradkowski got hurt last year (another non-endorsement for Jones). Vick did late-career Vick stuff for a few games—ran around in circles, launched the occasional bomb, got injured—forcing the Steelers to turn to Jones.
Byron Leftwich was the backup when Roethlisberger suffered a shoulder injury in November 2012. Leftwich threw an interception, was sacked three times and famously injured himself by somehow tripping …
